Culture
cortex | May 15, 2007Here's the Pope, speaking on his recent trip to Brazil:
Where God is absent -- God with the human face of Jesus Christ -- these [moral] values fail to show themselves with their full force: nor does a consensus arise concerning them.
I do not mean that nonbelievers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality; I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values.
I think the Pope gets his causality backwards. Human morality is largely a product of natural selection, not…
razib | May 12, 2007Over the past few years I've reach a position which I'm not particular happy with: religious neutrality & diversity together are pretty much doomed. In the United States the separation of church & state crystallized at a time when Protestantism was normative, and despite all their differences this branch of Christianity shares some commonalities. With the entrance of Catholicism and Judaism into the religious matrix there was some accommodation, but the reality is that to a great extent American Judaism & Catholicism have been "Protestantized" through various Kulturkampfs (e.g.,…
cortex | May 11, 2007One day, I want to compile a collection of all the metaphors that have shaped modern science. The sciences of the mind, perhaps because we know so little about the mind, have been particularly vulnerable to the lure of facile analogy. There's the classic "mind-as-computer" metaphor which, although useful, is certainly imperfect. Before computers, the mind was compared to "holograms," "telephone switchboards" and "hydraulic pumps". It seems that we can hardly invent a new technology before we feel the need to impose it onto the mysterious workings of the brain.
Of course, every science has…
cortex | May 9, 2007Yesterday, Massachusetts announced a massive new stem cell research program, which amounts to more than $1 billion dollars in new funding. The grants are good, but I'm most excited by Governor Patrick's proposal for a stem cell bank, the first of its kind in America. According to the Boston Globe, eight hospitals and universities, including Harvard, have agreed to send their stem cell lines to the bank. Back when I was living in England, I wrote an article for the MIT Technology Review on the British stem cell bank:
The centerpiece of the British stem cell plan is a national stem cell bank,…
cortex | May 8, 2007Obama gave a good speech yesterday, outlining his plan to save Detroit from itself. He would basically force the Big Three (really the Shrinking Two) to invest in fuel efficient vehicles that run on alternative fuels*:
Obama proposed that the government pay for 10 percent of domestic automakers' health-care costs for retired workers through 2017 if the firms plow half the savings into equipment for making more efficient cars and trucks. Obama's campaign estimates that this would cost taxpayers roughly $7 billion over the next 10 years.
That said, I'd feel better about Obama's plans if he wasn…
cortex | May 7, 2007In the world of oenophiles, terroir is a sacred term. It's a French word with a murky English definition, but it's generally used to describe the relationship between a wine and the geographical place that it comes from. Chablis, for example, is renown for its hint of flint, which is supposedly a side-effect of the limestone beds in which the grapes are grown. Terroir is used to explain why genetically identical grape varietals (Chardonnay, Cabernet, Sangiovese) can taste so different in different locations. Grapes express the earth like oysters express the sea.
But is terroir a scientific…
sb admin | May 4, 2007Every so often, I'll get a forward from some friend or family member (usually not one who started using the Internet in college or grad school, as I did), warning us of some scam, some crime, some upcoming law, or some such. 99+% of the time, this is some sort of hoax. A quick search of the web will reveal that it's a reasonably well-known hoax; I'll respond to the whole list letting everybody know about this.
One of the best places for this sort of thing is snopes.com. Indeed, I received an E-mail this evening that was, on the face of it, fairly alarming. Fortunately, a quick visit to…
cortex | May 4, 2007Jonathan Weiner, author of the magisterial Beak of the Finch, has a lovely essay explaining what Darwin can teach writers. This struck close to the bone:
Sitzfleisch. Robert Oppenheimer once observed that a physicist needs not only inspiration but also sitzfleisch--the ability to keep one's flesh sitting in a chair. Writers need the same gift, and Darwin was a hero of sitzfleisch. Even his patience was larger than life. His motto was, "It's dogged as does it." After his big idea, he spent 20 years sitting at his desk, in the bosom of his growing family, working out his theory and its…
cortex | May 3, 2007Factoid of the day:
Bad eyewitness identifications contributed to 75 percent of wrongful convictions in cases that were overturned by DNA evidence.
Given these dismal statistics, some states have tried to fix their procedures for eyewitnesses. New Jersey, for example, used to do police lineups the standard way: witnesses identified suspects from an in-person lineup as detectives stood next to them. The police officers would sometimes offer words of encouragement. New Jersey has now done away with the lineup, and instead presents people one after the other. This is supposed to prevent…
cortex | May 2, 2007Mind Matters, David Dobbs' research blog over at Scientific American, is indispensable weekly reading. This week is no different. The topic is a paper documenting the importance of maternal presence in rat-pups. Apparently, the absence of a rat mother during a critical period of pup development permanently alters the behavior of the pup*:
In their recent Nature Neuroscience article, researchers Stephanie Moriceau and Regina Sullivan explore learned olfactory preference and aversion as mediated by maternal presence. In this study rat pups were exposed to a peppermint odor that was paired with…
cortex | April 30, 2007So here's a link to my future book (due out in November), which gives you a nice little synopsis of the subject. What do you think of the cover?*
*I'm personally interested in whether or not most people recognize the cookie as a madeleine, and thus get the Proust reference. My hunch is that, if it weren't for those insipid little madeleines next to the register at Starbucks, the madeleine would still be a relatively obscure French cookie.
cortex | April 30, 2007Another great Atul Gawande article on the aging process and the need for more geriatric specialists:
The single most serious threat she [an 86 year old woman] faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about three hundred and fifty thousand Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, forty per cent end up in a nursing home, and twenty per cent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these risk factors have a twelve-per-…
sb admin | April 27, 2007Check this poem out, posted at Bad Fortune Cookie (found via BoingBoing).
Disturbing, eh?
Of course, when a student writes a disturbing essay, what do we do in the post-VT massacre world? We lock him up! Freedom of speech be damned, we're locking people up for writing disturbing things!
Hysteria is such a bad thing. After the Colombine school massacres, for a while it became presumed criminal behavior to be a nerd in a trench coat.
Yeah, the disturbing writings of the VA Tech murderer were part of a larger pattern of warning signs that were all over the place suggesting that this was a guy…
cortex | April 26, 2007Alison Gopnik has written a thoroughly entertaining takedown of the mirror-neuron hype:
The myth of mirror neurons may not do much harm. Perhaps it's even good for science that in the 21st century we turn to the brain, rather than gods and monsters, for our mythical images. Still, science and science writing are supposed to get us closer to the truth, while the myth of mirror neurons may do just the opposite. Instead of teaching us about how the mind works, it may perpetuate some broad misconceptions about neuroscience and what the study of the brain can tell us about human nature.
You should…
cortex | April 26, 2007Christof Koch makes a compelling argument:
My empirical studies into the neurobiology of consciousness have convinced me that many species share the sights and sounds of life with us humans. Why? First, except for size, there are no large-scale, dramatic differences between the brains of most mammals (including humans). Second, when people experience pain and distress, they contour their face, moan, cry, squirm, and try to avoid anything that would trigger a reoccurrence of the pain. Many animals do the same. Likewise for the physiological signals that attend pain--like changes in blood…
cortex | April 25, 2007David Leonhardt has an excellent column on the squeezed middle class. He notes that while inequality is increasing, the other common complaint - that the income of middle class workers is now more volatile - is not supported by government statistics. There has been no great risk shift, at least when you look at income. As Leonhardt notes, accurately diagnosing the problem is a necessary part of coming up with a solution:
There is now a big push in both Washington and state capitals to come up with policies that can alleviate middle-class anxiety. That's all for the good. In fact, it is…
cortex | April 24, 2007Take note historians of the future. When you set out to write your tome, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you might find the following three stories, all of them appearing in today's New York Times, to be of interest. They are all symptoms of decadence run amok, the sure sign of a country in decline*:
1. Top Hedge Fund Managers Earn over $240 Million
Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion -- enough to pay New York City's 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years.
2. Toyota Overtakes GM in Sales for First Time
Toyota sold more cars and trucks…
cortex | April 24, 2007Not all wags mean the same thing. Careful analysis reveals an emotional difference between wags to the right and wags to the left. This asymmetry reflects an underlying asymmetry built into the mammalian brain:
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
A study describing the phenomenon, "Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli," appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio…
razib | April 23, 2007The April 16th issue of The New Yorker had an article by John Colapinto, The puzzling language of an Amazon tribe. It's in print, so I can't post it, but the short of it is that the tribe might lack recursion, a hammer blow to Chomskyan universal grammar. Overall the tribe seems to have a rather attenuated tendency toward engaging in abstract thought, and has been incredibly immune to any attempts by Christian missionaries to convert them. At some point in the piece the author notes that occasionally someone will ask a Christian if they've ever met this Jesus Christ that they keep talking…
cortex | April 20, 2007So Harry Reid announced that the Iraq war is lost, that there is no military solution to the crisis. He's being denounced, of course, by lots of right wing pundits, who are clamoring for his resignation. Regardless of whether or not you think the war is lost, I have trouble understanding how saying the war is lost is a bad thing. As I noted earlier, I think President Bush is suffering from a serious case of loss aversion. I believe that admitting defeat is simply be too painful a decision for Bush to make. Losing sucks, especially when the loss is entirely of your own making.
Psychologists…